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Tackling depression with ketamine

All is can say is.... HOLY FIDDLY FUCKITTY FUCK!! Way to go Doctors for once, as well as the USA being fucking progressive in something. This makes me so fucking happy to see you have no Idea. I found out in my Early 20's that Dissociatives and the way they work via NMDA and Glutamate is the best anti-depressant effect, which is long lasting far beyond when the drug is out of your system, and overall just Increases the Quality of Life of a SEVERELY Depressed person, such as myself.

I have used Ketamine, DXM, and MXE throughout my 20's, and they have helped me in so many ways, teaching me to evolve as a Human Being and be more loving, as well as Re-Learning how to actually enjoy life. I used to be the biggest fucking pothead for the anti-depressant, or so I thought effect, but weed just makes me lazy, which ends up in me being depressed because I accomplish nothing. Ketamine is pure inspiration to go out and enjoy and live your life - it's partially the Psychedelic effect that inspires this, but it really does make you not get so bummed out so quickly by things, it helps you learn to be Resilient and more Durable as a Human. I hate the term, but it really is a Wonderdrug compared to what we have now in SSRI's and SSNI's...........they take way too long to start working and fail in every 1 in 2 patients, plus many people go through several different SSRI'S and SSNI'S until they find the one that works for them in particular. It makes me so Happy to see Doctors around the USA taking this SERIOUSLY as a Legitimate Treatment. This Article is such a step in the right direction for Depression Research. Thank You so Much for posting this. SO many people could be helped by this compound, and I can't wait until the General Public starts to realize the Potential it has to SAVE LIVES, and even help Addicts of Drugs get better and get their life and some Braincells and being able to Enjoy their Life again. Awesome. What some people have known for years is FINALLY being Admitted by the White Coats. Keep it going guys, I don't even care if they develop a version of Ketamine where you can take a Pill once a day that isn't even Psychedelic at all, but it helps you feel the way you do Mentally. It truly makes Life Beautiful again and I hope some people who really need the help get their day of Happiness. - Mr. Meowfish
 
(ketamine) Rave drug holds promise for treating depression fast

http://www.nature.com/news/rave-drug-holds-promise-for-treating-depression-fast-1.16664

Ketamine, a psychoactive ‘party drug’ better known as Special K, has pharmaceutical companies riding high. Used clinically as an anaesthetic in animals and humans, it has proved an extremely effective treatment for depression, bipolar disorder and suicidal behaviour.

It also works incredibly fast. Unlike conventional antidepressants, which generally take weeks to start working, ketamine lifts depression in as little as two hours. “It blew the doors off what we thought we knew about depression treatment,” says psychiatrist James Murrough at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.

Companies are racing to develop patentable forms of the drug, and researchers are battling to understand how it affects the brain. An increasing number of clinicians are prescribing ketamine off-label for their patients, even as some of their colleagues worry that too little is known about its long-term effects.

The excitement over ketamine shows how badly new depression drugs are needed, says Thomas Insel, director of the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Maryland. Many drug companies have closed their mental-health divisions in the past five years, and there have been no significant advances in medication for depression in decades.

Today’s most common antidepressants target the brain’s serotonin or noradrenaline pathways (some target both). Ketamine blocks the signalling molecule NMDA, a component of the glutamate pathway, which is involved in memory and cognition. Before ketamine was studied, no one even knew that the pathway was involved in depression, Murrough says.

In 2013, his group published the largest trial of off-label ketamine carried out so far, with 73 participants. The trial found that the drug reduced depression 24 hours after treatment in 64% of patients who had tried three or more other medications with unsuccessful results. A second group received the sedative midazolam; in that case, the reduction was 28% (J. W. Murrough et al. Am. J. Psychiatry 170, 1134–1142; 2013). Murrough’s group is now imaging the brains of patients receiving ketamine treatment to try to dissect just how the drug works.

Murrough says that long-term studies of the drug’s effects should also be done before its use becomes widespread. And bioethicist Dominic Sisti of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia worries that too many physicians already consider it a standard part of their armamentarium. The way in which ketamine should be administered still needs to be worked out, says psychiatrist Kyle Lapidus at Mount Sinai Hospital. He already prescribes ketamine off-label for some patients, and guesses that dozens of physicians across the country do the same. At therapeutic doses, it often produces a dissociative, out-of-body sensation that lasts less than an hour. At higher doses, recreational users report experiencing a ‘K-hole’, a deeply disoriented state accompanied by vivid hallucinations.
Related stories

Companies hope to profit by developing patentable variations on ketamine for treating depression. A nasal spray containing a structural variant called esketamine earned a coveted ‘breakthrough therapy designation’ from the US Food and Drug Administration in 2013. The designation allows its manufacturer, Johnson & Johnson in New Brunswick, New Jersey, to fast-track esketamine through the regulatory process. The company plans to release the results of a 200-person study early this year; its head neuroscience researcher, Husseini Manji, says that initial results “look very good”.

Last month, a company called Naurex, based in Evanston, Illinois, released results from a 386-person trial showing that its own ketamine-like drug, GLYX-13, successfully treated depression in about half of patients, without hallucinatory side effects. Roche of Basel, Switzerland, is also expected to release results early this year from a 357-person trial of a drug called decoglurant, which targets the glutamate pathway.

It is unclear why ketamine’s psychoactive effects are considered a drawback, Sisti says. He questions the ethics of making patients pay more for a patented, non-dissociative drug if unmodified ketamine works just as well.

Ketamine’s fast action is particularly promising for suicide prevention, says Carlos Zarate of the NIMH. Instead of being committed to institutions for weeks of treatment, people who have just attempted suicide might be treated with ketamine and released in days or even hours. Zarate has found that ketamine seems specifically to affect the desire to attempt suicide, whether a person is clinically depressed or not (E. D. Ballard et al. J. Psychiatr. Res. 58, 161–166; 2014). That observation suggests that suicidal behaviour might be distinct from depression. Zarate is using ketamine to treat around 50 people with depression, some of whom have suicidal thoughts, to study these effects.

Early this year, his group will begin a multi-year study of people who have attempted suicide within the previous two weeks, imaging their brain activity and comparing them with people who attempted suicide more than a year previously and with people with depression who have never attempted suicide. Those who have recently attempted suicide will be enrolled in a clinical trial of ketamine; at the same time, Zarate hopes to learn more about what an actively suicidal brain looks like.
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Not much new in here, I'm guessing most people here will be familiar with dissos and depression. It's good to see people are trying to develop more "consumer friendly" analogs of it though :).
 
Glyx-13 sounds like the name of a virus from a zombie movie ha

So if clinicians are rxing k does thatean the patient goes in every so often and gets a shot? I'll have to look more into that BC AFAIK its only in I jectable and some kind of topical cream. I don't see drs giving vials of k to ppl along with some 1cc fine tips and saying go wild but be responsible haha. Great news in any case that a drug like letamine is being researched for more than k hole reasons. Its always been one of my favs and it really does give you a boost
 
Ketamine to treat treatment resistant depression and anxiety, PTSD as well as alcoholism/addiction has been going on since the early 2000's when, at least to my knowledge, certain academic institutions began researching it specifically as a therapeutic aid. And holly shit the potential! I mean to say that in 2011 after my own experience with the drug and similar drugs to treat my opioid habit and detox (described briefly in the post's 2nd to last paragraph), I began a correspondence with a researcher at Yale who, at the time, was one of the main pioneers of the treatment. From all the research papers and journals he sent me, at that point there was no doubt of ketamine's astounding efficacy.

An anti-depressant that works instantly - it's unique and hugely significant for that reason as, other than things like opioids and cocaine, there isn't anything else there like it, especially when we're talking about something that has next to no side effects or undesirable outcomes like treating depression with, say, methadone or buprenorphine (which in some countries is funny enough used for that purpose, the bupe I mean).

Of course having to get a shot every week to two weeks means having to go to at least a clinic, which is problematic. Even worse is that this novel and that has been established as safe with a very high efficacy rate is inaccessible to well over 90% of those who need it most (more like inaccessible to 99% of those who need it most). On top of that, those doctors, programs and clinics that do offer the treatment charge exorbitant fees that I have yet to hear of ANY insurance company covering whatsoever, making it nearly impossible to even access the treatment, assuming you get into one of those programs offering it, that it's simply not economically viable for those of us who don't have that extra 100,000USD laying around.

This form of treatment was instrumental in really getting into my recovery from my long standing opioid habit, so in other words it's especially in terms of addiction. Using a slightly longer NMDAR antagonist I was able to detox from a 3g/day IV heroin habit with next to no withdrawal and few side effects. At the time I honestly couldn't understand it, it totally baffled me not to feel any classic w/d symptoms, especially from the significant habit I had, other than a bit of insomnia for up to maybe day five or six of the detox.

That experience began what will probably a life long quest to better understand such drugs, ketamine, DXM, iboga, etc etc. There is simply SO much potential in these compounds, although because they're largely based around the SAM model (or in the case of shorter acting NMDAR antagoinsts it's more of a modified SAM model as it's biweekly as opposed to just once every six months at most generally).
 
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Depression Treatments Inspired By Club Drug Move Ahead In Tests

Depression Treatments Inspired By Club Drug Move Ahead In Tests
MAY 28, 2015
JON HAMILTON

Antidepressant drugs that work in hours instead of weeks could be on the market within three years, researchers say.

"We're getting closer and closer to having really, truly next-generation treatments that are better and quicker than existing ones," says Dr. Carlos Zarate, a researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health.

The new drugs are based on the anesthetic ketamine, which is also a popular club drug known as Special K. Unlike current antidepressants, which can take weeks to work, ketamine-like drugs have an immediate effect. They also have helped people with depression who didn't respond to other medications.

The drug that is furthest along is esketamine, a chemical variant of ketamine that has been designated a potential breakthrough by the Food and Drug Administration. Esketamine is poised to begin Phase 3 trials, and the drug's maker, Johnson & Johnson, plans to seek FDA approval in 2018.

Can Ketamine Keep Depression At Bay?

Another ketamine-like drug on the horizon is rapastinel. It has completed Phase 2 studies, which showed "rapid, substantial, and sustained reductions in depressive symptoms," according to the drug's maker, Naurex.

"I think it's highly probable that we'll see some version of one of these treatments being approved in the relatively near future," says Dr. Gerard Sanacora, director of the Yale Depression Research Program. "In my mind it is the most exciting development in mood disorder treatment in the last 50 years."

Sanacora has done consulting work for both Naurex and Johnson & Johnson. He is also an investigator for a study in which esketamine will be given to suicidal patients.

A rat neuron after treatment with ketamine.

The new drugs come nearly a decade after Zarate and other researchers from the National Institutes of Health published a study showing that ketamine helped most people with major depression in less than two hours. "When we saw the first initial responses you say, wow, this will definitely revolutionize our treatments for mental illness," Zarate says.

Since then, many other studies have confirmed that ketamine usually works even when other drugs have failed. "At this point I think it's incontrovertible that the drug has clear, robust rapid antidepressant effect," Sanacora says. Studies suggest that effect usually lasts for a week or so.

But ketamine itself has shortcomings. It can cause hallucinations, and it's a drug that is frequently abused.

Also, from the perspective of drug companies, ketamine is problematic because it is already available as an inexpensive generic drug. So companies including Naurex and Johnson & Johnson began searching for compounds they could patent that would have a similar effect in the brain.

If esketamine and repastinel reach the market, they could be blockbuster sellers. Johnson & Johnson included esketamine on a list of drugs with potential annual sales of more than $1 billion.

continued here http://www.npr.org/sections/health-...nts-inspired-by-club-drug-move-ahead-in-tests
 
neversickanymore said:
If esketamine and repastinel reach the market, they could be blockbuster sellers. Johnson & Johnson included esketamine on a list of drugs with potential annual sales of more than $1 billion.
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Are you guys trying to help treat patients suffering from depression? Or are you trying to help treat yourselves to new yachts? About as ethical as mercenaries, you greedy twits are, but I digress.

Perhaps the use of Ketamine would be widespread today, if only we didn't have to deal with clueless politicians who seem to base their drug addiction expertise solely on the observation of others.
 
I've often wondered if this is why ketamine became so popular in the party scene - and especially, in my experience, as a drug used at recovery clubs/parties. Perhaps the anti-depressant effect of ketamine serves to counteract the depressing comedown from MDMA/amphetamine and their myriad of analogues?

I've also found, personally, that it (and MXE) help immensely with the post-acute symptoms of opiate withdrawal. It's definitely a fascinating drug, and one which needs further research - a shame the pharmaceutical industry have got their filthy paws on it and are planning to exploit it for all it's worth.
 
i got hold of some s-ketamine with the intention of using it to follow jamshyd or foreigner's regimen low dose IM injection.

but there is no way in hell i can poke myself like 8 times a day even if it eventually becomes 4 times a day

ended up holing a few times and found out it works a treat for mdma comedowns

now im exploring 15ug of lsd twice a week for depression

But ketamine itself has shortcomings. It can cause hallucinations, and it's a drug that is frequently abused.
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yees heaven forbid we have a visionary or euphoric experience, i think the world might come to an end if we enjoyed ourselves!!!
 
I just had a great idea. Someone make me a transdermal ketamine patch, pretty please?
 
K at these dosage ranges and for short period use, is a lot less harmful for ur brain chemistry than any classic antidepressant on the market today.

Which lots of people take for years every day, then stay on it for life or go through a terrible extended withdrawal syndrome while tapering off, wondering, what happened?
 
jammin83 said:
I have a hard time believing that daily ketamine use could be good for anybody. A lower dose than a recreational dose I am sure, but from what I know, daily ketamine use can shut down just about every organ in your body, not just bladders. I'm sure it could be effective, for a while, but at what cost? What kind of rebound symptoms? What kind of withdrawal symptoms? What kind of adaptations are being made in your brain to adjust to this stuff? What kind of damage is done? I'm sure someone will get fucking rich though. I am always a bit skeptical of pharmaceutical promise, esp. concerning psych drugs.

Sounds dangerous as shit and, as usual, people with mental illness are the guinea pigs.

ro4eva makes some great points.
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I didn't read this whole article so correct me if I missed something, but ketamine infusions for depression usually only occur a few times a month.

I think fear of the drug is one of the biggest obstacles facing ketamine treatment for depression (headlines like this don't help). That problem alone makes alternative like esketamine that much more valuable, even if ketamine is just as safe and effective.
 
Every two weeks (for a limited amount of time, say six months) was fairly standard in most of the depression studies I've ready, but that was uptodate info like two or three years ago. I think it can range from 1/week to 1/month, depending.
 
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what I think is funny is that in most of these articles, ketamine is presented as a club drug or whatever, and of course the famous "horse anaesthetic", but rarely they mention that it is widely therapeutically used in humans already as an anaesthetic thus already proven to be suitable as far as the safety profile goes (treatment for depression would use much lower doses than anaesthetic use).
 
jammin83 said:
I have a hard time believing that daily ketamine use could be good for anybody. A lower dose than a recreational dose I am sure, but from what I know, daily ketamine use can shut down just about every organ in your body, not just bladders. I'm sure it could be effective, for a while, but at what cost? What kind of rebound symptoms? What kind of withdrawal symptoms? What kind of adaptations are being made in your brain to adjust to this stuff? What kind of damage is done? I'm sure someone will get fucking rich though. I am always a bit skeptical of pharmaceutical promise, esp. concerning psych drugs.

Sounds dangerous as shit and, as usual, people with mental illness are the guinea pigs.

ro4eva makes some great points.
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i agree, ive taken ketamine on several occasions and cant imagine daily use would be that successful against depression..it didnt really help mine at the time..
 
I've never seen anything suggesting daily use would be benefitial OR necessary (outside of managing acute opioid withdrawal perhaps, although ket isn't long acting enough for that to be practical).

From personal/anecdotal and the research out there, although no medication is without problems or a panacea, I just can't see how low dose infusiions once every other week for a while could be worse the what we have to work with for depression atm.

Also keep in mind that this treatment was intended only for patients for whom other treatments for depression failed, hence the population catagoty "treatment resistant depression." I was just about to draw a horrible analogy to make this point but I should stfu and eat something.
 
maybe some people here should read up on current studies on ketamine for depression. it's not the same thing as recreational use.
 
Precisely. Nothing at all the same.

Anecdotally speaking, I've had experiences with ketamine, DXM and at least one other related drug, so that I can totally see how it could help issues related to depression, anxiety and/or trauma (all three in my case). Unlike DXM, ketamine's longer acting NMDAr antagonist cous, ketamine is much more easily tolerated; I think like 2/3 of 1/3 of people who try even a low recreational dose (80-150mg) of DXM tolerate it (or again so I've experienced and read). Ketamine also has way way way fewer side effects compared to something like DXM. I'm digressing here a bit much though...

There are some great early studies of ketamine used successfully to address treatment resistant depression out of Yale. I wish I still had my old computers, I'd upload a few files here... Still such studies have become pretty darn commonly available now, so it shouldn't be so hard to find them.
 
eh, maybe I'll give it a shot, how much and which muscle? I'm not paying for something I can do myself. Maybe I'll just plug some MXE.
 
Wrong drug... Wrong ROA.

It's not easy to do your own treatment with ketamine unless u are medically supervised or have some history in medical fields.
 
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